Recently I got a mass-email from this guy who went overseas years ago. He forgot to do a blind carbon copy, and all the email addresses were visible – a snapshot of his address book from 2004 or so. It was time-travel, the sight of all these email addresses next to each other. A window to a season of my life. Everyone’s scattered now, all these young christian leftists brought together by the Iraq War protests. Do they even use these same addresses any more? You won’t ever catch them all in the same room again. Too many schisms, divorces, deconversions, metamorphoses. That’s what your twenties do to you.

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You can tell things about people from their email addresses. Older people (Baby Boomers +) usually have ISP addresses – iinet, bigpond – and it’s usually in the name of the husband, even if the wife uses the account. (How many people sixty plus have you met with a gmail address?) People with a ‘hotmail’ address have had their address an awful long time. Attention-seekers have an attention-seeking email address. The great transition in my life, the change in epochs, was when I changed from ‘savageparade’ (it’s a quote from Rimbaud) to my name. I am pretty certain I changed personality at that moment.